12 LLMOVING AND LYRICAL." - DOUGLAS UNGER, TI-IE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ,r ;f 'jo> '! < ,"" .., . ,/-r\" , .. '. .. . . : : :" . . . . I" " ' 1f..... " \, t ' . -,. ':"':: '.? .-.. :',\ A NOVEI DOUGLAS BAUER t1\ novel of considerable d 11 nuance an power. - MICHIKO KAKuTANI TI-IE NEW YORK TIMES tl-\n extraordinary affecting story, written . th 77 WI grace. - J OAi'\I BUNKE, TI-IE DES MOINES SUNDAY REGISTER ti\. novel possessing tremendous heart.... Bauer is a consummate storyteller, his prose is hyPnotic, charged with beauty and pain. 77 - MELISSA PRITCHARD, CI-IICAGO TRIBUNE HENRy iH OLT Available in paperback horn Owl Books THE VERY AIR A NOVEL B) DOUGLAS BAUER -- \. ',-, '\ , 1 . ' . ' ,. ; 1 d , . ., : j \ , r t f1 ' I ' --...... --=- ............. j - :;;': .... ::',,: .." - ': . w _ J , J16 61 , .,. "You're kidding! You don't look a day over Hillary. " . rious fiction as the last line of defense against the three-minute attention span should not be to forget the songs, gags, and puckish anecdotes that were strewn over the landscape of a book like "Grav- ity's Rainbow." The worst outcome of any debate on literary speed would be a clear- cut decision to treat the quick as lowbrow and the slow as high; the desire to weigh one's words, on the page or in speech, should be tempered by the recognition that few of them are worth weighing. The least convincing passage in "Cold Mountain" shows the hero reading John B ' " T I " , 1 artram s rave s at a worm s craw: "First he read it until each word rested in his head with a specific weight peculiar to itself: for if he did not, his attention just skittered over phrases so they left no marks. That accomplished, he fixed in his mind the setting. . . ." Get on with it. Even our best readers, such as Mon- taigne and Dr. Johnson, were, by their own admission, pretty bad readers. "1 t is strange that there should be so little read- ing in the world and so much writing," Johnson said, with the air of one stand- ing in Barnes & Noble and watching a boy try to pick up a girl by the Prousts. When a snob affected shock at Johnson's "cursory mode of reading," he asked tartly, "Do you read books through?" Such honesty is more necessary than ever. It . can only be a good thing that "Mason & Dixon" should become a best-seller, but it would indeed be a wondrous thing if all those who bought the epic actually finished it-if parts of it didn't remain as dauntingly unread as "A Brief History of Time." There is no shame in giving up, and plenty of pleasure in the dip and skip. The real test will come as the months go by and the serious stuff melts away to be replaced by novels with grenades or panties on the cover. If the Slow Read is really more than a fad, the next move will be to search out older works by DeLillo or Pynchon; or, better still, to return to Melville and Sterne, in order to remind ourselves where the looping, striding style of the moderns came from; or even-but keep it quiet-to try a dose of poetry. Dead poets lie beyond the reach of fashion, and they ask to be read, and reread, at a pace of one's own devising. The impulse to read Don DeLillo because everyone else is read- ing Don DeLillo, or because profiles of Don DeLillo have made you curious to learn more, is by no means dishonor- able, but neither is it permanent. When the woman beside you on the subway, though, misses her stop because she's trying to unravel a Mallarme sonnet- now, that could be the start of some- thing big -ANTHONY LANE